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>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it. I wasn’t really think

• spoils19 4y ago
  A user on HN, kamaal, posted something that many on this site agree with: > Let's be honest this is far from what people call slavery. They are being paid multiples of six digit salaries, RSUs and work in one of the most happening tech ecosystems of the world. > I would love to be a part of something like this. Heck most of us would love to be a part of something like. > I kind of envy those guys working on these projects. I hope I was the one there.
  • bobleeswagger 4y ago
    It's kind of sad when you have the perspective. Nobody working for a tech company in an at-will agreement is a wage slave, period. People just want to be victims, though.
  • biohax2015 4y ago
    For real. Go work at an insurance company if you can’t take the heat.
  • ddellacosta 4y ago
    I understand the point being made, but this is fundamentally naive and counter-productive for everyone who wants to be working in this industry as a software engineer. Engineers are going to get exploited: just shrugging and saying "but we get paid well enough" means stuff like this: https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ https://hirecloud.io/hr-and-recruiting-news/the-techtopus-ho... will continue to happen over, and over, and over. So, unfortunately, your post encourages what the ones at the top with all the capital love: getting the rest of us fight over the scraps. Because the truth is that it's all scraps to them, and that's how they want to keep it.
    • tylersmith 4y ago
      People like the OP are not fighting for scraps, they're doing what they love and enjoying their lives while getting scraps. People that don't enjoy doing that stuff resent them because they have to compete at stuff like they don't like to do for scraps. That's only a negative for one side.
      • aks_tldr 4y ago
        Until people like OP wake up one day and see what they been doing in name of "love", it all comes crashing down. been there done that.
    • lumenwrites 4y ago
      Shouldn't people be free to make up their own minds and make their own choices? If someone likes that work environment - great, let them work very hard on interesting and meaningful projects, these are the kind of people Elon Musk seems to want to leave at twitter. People who don't like this kind of work environment are free to leave for companies more focused on work-life balance.
      • ddellacosta 4y ago
        I may be trying to persuade, but I'm not being prescriptive. I'm just stating the logical outcome of behaving based on the thinking in the post I was responding to.
    • CamperBob2 4y ago
      Fighting over scraps isn't the best way to see it, IMO. If I'm busting my ass at a job, it's because I share the vision (if not the capital) of the people I'm working for, want to see that vision executed, and want to take an active part in executing it well. If that is not the case, it doesn't matter how much I'm being paid, I'm not going to be happy ("self-actualized") for long. Likewise, whether I work 40 or 60 hours a week has no bearing on this. I imagine quite a few people joined Twitter because they believed in the company's stated mission and the vision of its founder. The mission and vision have now changed, so it's appropriate for some of those people to move on, voluntarily or otherwise. Framing it as some kind of Marxist class struggle sheds no light on the issue, and isn't helpful in the least.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    On the other hand it'd be great if people lucky enough to be caught in a temporary storm of spying-ad-supported stupid money would use some of that leverage to improve workers' rights more broadly rather than working overtime for free. If you're exchanging time for money, you ain't on the capital side of the struggle.
  • NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    On the other hand "exempt" employees as we're legally defined, make less money per hour the more we work because we're "exempt" from overtime pay. The fact this is even legal indicates congress sold out the working class in the '80s. Sure you may be able to slack off a lot in some jobs, and effectively make more money per hour. But it's an absolute certainty that if you work 80 hours a week, you're not going to be paid more as an exempt employee. It's one of the nice things about being a contractor, you can actually get overtime pay. And as a result most companies will be strict about not making you work more than 40. Funny how that works.
  • civopsec 4y ago
    Just saying that you are “lucky” without considering the fact that you make money for your employer makes you into a simp for your employer. So you’re privileged, you say. What about your employer?
• fnimick 4y ago
  Not just that, but every employee who wants to work nights and weekends puts pressures on those who don't to catch up or be cut. It's a race to the bottom that leads to people who do have things they need to do scheduling emails to go out late at night, changing the times on their commits, etc to look like they are as "committed" as the rest of the team. It's harmful and damaging and I'm not at all surprised that people here support it.
  • tylersmith 4y ago
    If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut.
    • blooalien 4y ago
      > "If people are scheduling emails and faking commits to feign value then they should absolutely be cut." While you're 100% correct in that, I do believe the "parent" post is against people being put into situations where they begin to feel that such actions are their only remaining option if they ever want to have a life outside of work.
    • fnimick 4y ago
      So when your new teammate decides to start working through the weekend and suddenly you need to do so as well in order to match them in the performance review, what's your response? And notice that I didn't say anything about the quality of work being delivered - when you need to be visibly pulling overtime with the exact same work output in order to compete, what do you do?
      • nostrademons 4y ago
        So I'm actually in that situation (I have young kids and can't realistically work more than 8 hours/day), and my actual response was: switch into management and have the young, enthusiastic employees work for me. I feel like this thread contains a lot of people upset that other people are better than them at a game that's not worth playing anyway. Promotion is an extremely artificial game setup so that neither companies nor employees have to play the actual game of capitalism. In a real market economy you deliver value by trading with others; if you feel that others are capturing more value than you, take the other side of the trade. When competition requires that you work 60 hour weeks to be considered good at a field, that's a sign that there are too many people in that field and you should get out of it and instead consider employing that field in your new job instead.
• ketralnis 4y ago
  It's kind of a weird situation. As told, this person enjoyed what they were doing and hanging out with their friends, and that happened to be on a project that benefited their employer. This sounds like it's not your problem. Except you're troubled by it because you're competing with them. You don't have fun hanging out late at work and living on Mountain Dew and Cheetos but you're competing for the same salaries and promotions as people that do. Them glibly throwing away their weekends does affect you because you're in the same competition space as them. I dunno, I have some dissonance here. I've been young and had fun on a work project and did unpaid overtime because I just really enjoyed it, and I'd have been rightly pretty pissy about it if you unrelated unaffected person on the internet told me to stop. I still do sometimes. But now that I'm older if I were laid off in favour of all-nighter people I'd also be pretty pissy about that. Especially if those terms changed after I chose an employer based on the stated hours and felt like I met them. The way you "solve" this in a market way is by putting it in the employment terms. I take a job knowing the terms, and maybe I take a pay cut for choosing the non-all-nighters job, fine. But then a Musk can come along and ignore all of that. The protectionist way is regulating the all-nighter folk away but younger me would have absolutely ignored it and a Musk event would have rewarded it in exactly the way you're unhappy about.
  • spaced-out 4y ago
    This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time. All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Passionate young engineers sinking their life into a project only to get the same, or an even worse deal than the people who did less work but were more politically savvy.
    • godshatter 4y ago
      This is probably why they got fired: > One day I created a tool that made it faster to download things from your work email that you might need if you were looking for a job: performance evaluations and that sort of thing. I posted the tool on Slack so that my colleagues could also benefit from it if they needed to. One hour and four minutes later I was fired. I credit them for wanting to help their peers and it sounds like their intentions were good and I'm not supporting this decision by upper management but it sure seems like an unwise thing to do during an organizational change like this. Especially if you like working 70 hour weeks and helping out peers just for the sake of making someone's life easier.
• joshuamcginnis 4y ago
  Generations of workers fought for the _choice_ to not work weekends. Some people, including myself, are happy to work weekends and long hours if its worth it. The point is, it should be the workers choice and if they don't like it, they should be able to leave and find something better. There are clearly still plenty of engineers at Twitter who have done the cost-benefit analysis and decided staying was right for them.
  • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    If it doesn't cost the company significantly extra (say, due to overtime), then the company's interest is increasing work hours for everyone to the max. In such a situation, other workers doing so, and getting discretionarily rewarded for it simply erodes the position of those who, rightfully, refuse to work more than they need to. Unless there's a fixed "here's how much extra you will be rewarded, and thus how much it will cost the company" policy about working past normal working hours, people who do so are scabs.
    • joshuamcginnis 4y ago
      There's a mountain of evidence that companies (which by the way, often includes employee who hold equity in the companies they work) are incentivized towards increased productivity but not hours worked. That so many companies are now offering "unlimited vacation", "wellness days", and "no work Fridays" is indictive of this. One can find fulfillment in hard work and going the extra mile without that expectation from the employer and without expectation of a tangential reward. There is often intrinsic value in hard work that can be rewarding in and of itself. There have been times in my life where I stayed late or worked weekends on my own accord because I felt the situation warranted it. I wasn't asked to do it and I didn't get paid extra, but I felt good doing it and in the long-run, the short-term sacrifice yield wonderful long-term gains.
• mrazomor 4y ago
  Well said! Thanks for calling it out. > just because we're paid well. People might try another perspective. Does $200k a year sound good? How about $100k a year? How many say "yes" to the first, but "no" to the second? While still working weekends and staying late -- that's lying to yourself. Working unpaid overtime, devaluates the employee. If it comes from more senior colleagues or managers, then it's at risk of creating an implicit culture. One not suitable for people with responsibilities outside the work place.
• zamalek 4y ago
  It's not only that it's "not cool," but the outcomes of long hours don't match the expectations. The concept of "more person-hours in, more productivity out" heralds from the days of Ford, and strictly applies to individuals performing rote jobs on a factory floor (to a certain degree): tightening bolt after bolt, painting the car hoods as they roll by, nailing two pieces of wood together, etc. Human biology is adept at building up physical stamina when exposed to continued physical stress. During the alleged information age we have seen (time and time again) that our biology is woefully inadequate at building up mental stamina: we just get mentally exhausted (i.e. stupid). Ultimately, if you pour more person-hours into software (or other "mind jobs") you should expect to get an inferior end product and/or diminished productivity. Just look at Musk himself: sending out completely idiotic emails at 2AM. At least a portion of his behavior could be attributed to having completely diminished his mental faculties due to overworking himself.
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    This is an important point that gets overlooked in these discussion. Which is weird because I thought most programmers had learned the hard way that coding while tired is a surefire way to just generate more work.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    > At least a portion of his behavior could be attributed to having completely diminished his mental faculties due to overworking himself. This feels like a really under appreciated point. If you overwork yourself for 10 years it's going to have nasty effects on you.
• matwood 4y ago
  > Hobbies and other things outside of work that give our lives meaning. Generations of workers fought hard for things like weekends and we shouldn't just glibly throw them away just because we're paid well. One of my big hobbies was doing everything I could on a computer way before I got paid to program. I doubt the author considered what they did a waste since they were doing something they enjoyed.
• throw8383833jj 4y ago
  I totally agree. Here's my hypothesis as to why people are so glib about throwing away their lives for their employer: People depend on their employer for their entire livelyhood. This day and age, without a pay check, you can't have any basic needs: Shelter, food or water and you'd be out on the street or worse: the average homeless person (it's shocking) lives 30 years less than a housed one. So, it's no surprise that a large segement of people end up with stockholm's syndrom from their employer. they begin to identify with their captor and even take on their values and their beliefs. If you're kidnapped, at least you have some hope of escape. but when you're employed, you are the prison guard who holds the key. so you have no hope of escape, this amplifies the stockholm's syndrom.
  • deltree7 4y ago
    Can you apply your brilliant logic to Elon Musk who works 100 hours per week? or Warren Buffett who still goes to work? Many people enjoy work.
    • throw8383833jj 4y ago
      Gladly. Everyone, even billionaires undergo social conditioning from an early age. Some people have a need to be successful in order to feel good about themselves. they feel they need to "be" someone. And for some, their work becomes a part of their identity. Becoming a billionaire doesn't free you from all the stuff that's been conditioned into you.
    • noahchumsky 4y ago
      Do you seriously think Elon works 100 hours a week? What evidence do you have to support this? Most people do find fulfillment out of work, many even enjoy it, myself included. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight to be compensated for what we put in, and doesn't mean we shouldn't practice solidarity with coworkers, many of whom don't have the time to work as much as we do (for example a working mother).
      • rurp 4y ago
• bsder 4y ago
  > It's great the author is fine wasting his weekend working on changes to a verification system that was launched for only a few days, but some of us have family and friends we like to spend time with. No, it's great that the author helped out a colleague. The fact that it benefited Twitter is secondary. Helping out your colleagues (who are now all over new companies as they've all been fired from Twitter) is how you build your network, get your next job, get people to give you nice recommendations, etc. Corporations are amoral and greedy and should not be helped unless they are helping you, but that doesn't mean you should piss on everything and everyone around you either.
• civopsec 4y ago
  I thought about commenting on this. But I figured that people would just take the argument down the path of indirectly competing about who the most passionate hacker (tm) is.
• octopolus 4y ago
  > It's not cool to paint pressuring employees to work long hours as a good thing, and we need to be more vocal about this Just stop, please. There's nothing wrong with working long hours and people enjoy it, let them live in peace.
  • ilyt 4y ago
    That entirely depends on compensation.
• chasing 4y ago
  "Hey, boss. I'm going to need you to go ahead and pay me twice as much this week. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to work any extra. But just think of the sense of accomplishment you'll have seeing me drive into the parking lot in the new car that you helped make happen! High five!"